Posts Tagged ‘Reno Social Media’

Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies, and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own collections and/or ‘like’ photos. Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting” via a global platform of inspiration and idea sharing. It is one of the “fastest growing social services in the world.”

Make your Content Visual

The brilliance behind this new social network is that it only works with visual posts or content– photos and videos. We often fail to realize that we have the ability to change our content into visual posts by using word art, pictures to say the same thing, or creating an image that includes the words we want to convey.

Why would we want visual content rather than just plain text?

Because we are human beings – we want things to be pretty and interesting, we want to be surprised and engaged, we crave something new to share with the world (or our part of it) and most of all – we want to express ourselves; this new social network is just one more way to do this. Sharing (or pinning as Pinterest calls it) allows us to show the world things we find interesting and connect with others who share the same opinions and interests. Visual posts on social media sites go viral more often, last longer, and have more shares than plain text or links – period. Pictures and videos are the mediums we crave; they frequently move us and inspire sharing visual posts with our friends, especially on this new social network, Pinterest.

How can I get on Pinterest?

This new social network has made their site an invitation only affair. This may at first make you think they are trying to limit the number of people adopting their social network – but it is very similar to “friending” someone on Facebook. You just need an in with someone who is already on Pinterest (chances are, one of your current Facebook friends is already on this new social platform and excited to extend you an invite – just ask).

If you are interested in more about this new social network, or visual posts on other networks, drop us a line at 775-322-3663 and we can chat about it or send you an invite to join in the pinning fun. Go, be social; share what moves and inspires you.

Almost everyone in America knows what YouTube is and that you can find almost anything on it to entertain yourself. What you may not know is that it is becoming the new search tool of the Millennials (Generation Z); rather than words, they want video answers to their questions.

Why Video Marketing?

If we think about our past, it isn’t surprising that we are drawn to the visual relay of information – a picture paints 1000 words, right? So a video must communicate a million, easy. It is one of the fastest ways to share and ingest pieces of information between human beings. It’s why commercials cost more than other forms of advertising. Technology has allowed each of us to share our own personal cave wall art with everyone in the world who has access to the internet. What IS surprising is that although this powerful medium has become advanced enough that you can make a video from your phone and post it online in mere minutes; there are few businesses that have truly committed to using it to its full potential.

It’s Easy to Use

It is an amazing time to be a business – especially a tech-savvy one! If you have a marketing department or an advertising agency that is already creating fantastic commercial quality videos for your company, feel free to repurpose them and upload them to a company YouTube channel or a Vimeo account, which both offer easy sharing options to social media platforms. If you don’t have access to commercially produced video footage, there are dozens of options for video recorders that are relatively inexpensive, simple to use, and a breeze to upload.

How do I make it Effective?

If you are making the video, or you have the ability to give direction to those who are, remember that online there are many distractions and it is important to grab your audience’s attention immediately and then keep them watching your ad. Recent research, by Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Thales S. Teixeira, shows that the best attention capture is achieved when there is:

… a quick element of surprise at the beginning of an ad, followed by a longer period of joy…

Now that you know the formula, you can get busy making surprising, joyful videos that capture the attention of your audience. Just remember it is always important to be authentic and real about your product or service, even while you make viewers feel good.

If you would like some help in your video marketing endeavors, feel free to call us at 775-322-3663 today.

Proprietary Websites

Proprietary websites are everywhere; they offer cheap website designs and often, cheap hosting as well. However, there are free or open source options that provide much better benefits. There are a multitude of issues that come with this type of website platform – our top 5 are below:

Limited Design & Branding Options

No Ownership or Flexibility

No SEO Options

No Search Engine Respect

No Support

1. Limited Design & Branding Options

You are limited to the color palates, lay out templates, and widgets that they have available.

There are thousands of websites out there – and probably hundreds of businesses that do something similar to yours. So how do you stand out? Being online is important – including social media (but we’ve gone over that before); however, it doesn’t help to distinguish yourself when your website looks like everyone else’s. Your business is unique in some way, shape or form – show that to your clients!

2. No Ownership or Flexibility

You do not own your proprietary website – the creator does. If you want to move your site or use a different designer, you have to start from scratch. This is frustrating and costly as the services you have already paid for basically disappear and are wasted. You cannot take it with you when you leave – and if something happens to the business that created your proprietary website – you lose everything.

3. No SEO Options

Most websites are being created so people (clients or customers) can find them and buy the service or product you sell. The way a website is found by most people is through searching. We enter keywords or terms we think apply to our topic and a list of relevant websites is returned to us. These keywords or terms are coded into the back end of every webpage. Without them, your website can only be found by someone who has the exact address – so they already know you and your website.

These proprietary websites often have no way for you to set up your SEO (search engine optimization), which means no one will find your website unless you tell them how to get there. No searches will return your company and your website is pretty much useless for bringing in new clients.

4. No Search Engine Respect

If, by some miracle, your proprietary website has a special upgrade or ‘pro plan’ that will give you SEO options (for a price), you need to know one last thing: Search Engines can tell who built your website, and they don’t love proprietary site builders. If your search engine doesn’t respect your website, you are not likely to end up at the top of your target client’s search results; which means unhappiness for your business rather than increased sales and a bright new outlook on the future growth of your company and cash flow.

5. No Support

Let’s face it – things go wrong- and when they do, a great portion of our satisfaction with a service is the ability of the offender to make it right again. Most of these proprietary websites have clunky forms, round-a-bout ways to contact them, or no human response whatsoever. When your company reputation or your personal one depends on how you respond, you need to know that you have fast, reliable support available. This is usually not the case with a proprietary website – if you can find a way to contact them, they are not usually very efficient and an emergency on your part does not an emergency on their part make.

Our Recommendations

We have been designing and developing websites for many years – and we have learned that open source platforms are the most user-friendly, wholly owned, SEO ready, massively supported and unique option for websites today.

Platforms like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal make creating a customized, branded experience for your customers a simple, straight forward, and effective process for your business.

Call us today at 775-322-3663 to learn more about how Integris Marketing can help your website work for you!

You have probably heard before, how important it is to brand your company and build authority through social media. However, some businesses are not ready or able to commit the kind of time and personnel it takes to manage a full-force online marketing campaign for their brand. There are also some barriers to internally managing these platforms; according to Towers Watson research, the main factors which prevent organizations from being able to implement needed solutions are:

Limited Knowledge of Social Media

Lack of IT Support or Technical Capability

Limited Staff/Resources to Implement

Restrictions imposed by The Company’s Legal Department

Lack of CEO or Senior Management Support

Lack of Metrics to Measure Impact

This is where out sourcing can help your brand reach its online marketing goals. At Integris Marketing, we are external experts with expertise in managing social media for business purposes. We know how powerful these platforms can be, but we also know that they must be customized to work well for your brand.

Our extensive social media knowledge and technical experience will ensure that we are able to advise you on the platform that will work best for you and your brand. Our resources are very flexible, which allows us to reallocate resources to projects as needed. We start every project off by looking at the current data for your brand, then crafting a plan that we can implement with your full support.

Some of the areas of social media that we can assist you with, include: Blogging (enhances all website content and drives internet search traffic by improving SEO); Social Bookmarking and News (can also dramatically increase website traffic by improving SEO); Social Networking (i.e. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn); Visual and Audio Social Networking (i.e. YouTube, podcasts, and photo-sharing); or even Building your own Social Network. Any posts we create for your brand will be subject to your approval in order to avoid any issues with legality and to maintain the tone that makes your brand unique.

To get started with your brand’s social media presence using a data-driven professional process, call us at (775) 322-3663 or (800) 233-0239, or contact us with your inquiry.

With the plethora of choices in today’s marketing arena, our clients often ask us, “what works?” We have a straightforward answer. It depends. Return on Investment (ROI) in the various marketing venues depends on your business and more specifically, on your customer.

You’ll find when you work with us that one of the first things we’ll do is gather data. We want to know what’s working now, and what’s proving to be a waste of money. We will use this data to find the path ahead and to provide the most relevant and accurate suggestions for your hard earned dollar.

We also pinpoint your potential customer. You’ll hear us talking again and again about who your customer is. We’ll be marketing directly to those customers, both current and potential. Your customers determine the venues we choose to market your company. Your customer, in fact, is king and queen of almost all of the decisions we make – even down to the color of your logo.

The most important thing for you to know about marketing your product in the many available venues is that the whole is greater than the parts. The aggregate solution for you is almost guaranteed to be a highly custom mix of marketing venues.

When we build your brand, we build it like no other.

You’ll find that when we build your brand, it is uniquely yours in look, feel, voice and in choice of venues.

So if you are looking for a cookie-cutter type website, we may not be the choice for you – but if you want to stand out above your competitors, and get the customers you know you can impress – then we are looking to help you build your brand. Call us today at 775.322.3663, or fill out our request form for more information. We look forward to hearing about your brand and your customers.

SEO (search engine optimization) has become a necessity for being found on the internet. There are estimated to be over 153,000,000 websites on the internet. So how do you optimize your website to be found by search engines? What separates your website from the other millions of sites out there?

One of the main things, here, is to understand how users reach your site. Meaning, what terms they type in to find your website. Reviewing this information for your site and then comparing the keywords that are found on your site by search engines, like Google, can help you see if you are on the right track with getting found. It is important to see how the content you are writing on your website matches up with the words that people are searching on the internet in order to find your site. If these two areas are not matching up then you need to adjust your keywords on your site and in your content to match the words or phrases that people are using to search for you or your product in order to be found.

Do you know your keywords?

Often people and businesses have self-proclaimed SEO experts set up their search engine optimization, which is fine, as long as it is being done correctly. It is important to understand what the keywords are on your website and why these words were chosen. Don’t be afraid to ask for the reasoning behind the keywords and the list of keywords that are being used for each page of your website. This is information that belongs to your website – not the website designer or developer. You have a right to know what is on your site and how it is being accessed. If you aren’t sure what is on your current site, and would like to know how your SEO is ranking, feel free to call Integris Marketing today at 775.322.3663 or, for a Free Website Assessment, click here.

Relevance in Search Results

When you use a search engine, like Google, you are looking for the match to the keywords you type in that are most relevant. This means they may have a local aspect if you are searching for restaraunts or movie theatres, as well as a date. Most of the time when we search for something, we want the most up to date results. If we are asking about information on movie times, we want them in a chronological order – with the most recent events first.

The Google Algorithm

Google is not only aware of this need, but they have worked out several updates to their algorithm that will impact the results returned based on the data stored about the pages – including dates. So what does this mean and why do you care?

A Common Problem

Here at Integris Marketing, we have several inquiries each week about how to show up at the top of the search engine results page. There are several things that can help, but we found this blog from Entrepreneur.com that covers an online strategy which we often promote ourselves as a continuing solution for keeping your website up to date and in the recent search engine results – a blog.

The Solution

Having a blog ensures that your website will be considered ‘updated’ each time you create and publish a post. This won’t solve all your problems, because it is important to have highly searched and relevant keywords set up in the meta fields for each of your website pages, but that is simple SEO and is fairly static. The solution with blogs is that Google will notice that you are updating and posting new information on your site, and as the blog describes, those that are not posting new content on their website will be left off the search engine results pages more and more in the future.

Additional Benefits of Blogging

This will not only give you the benefits of updating your website each time you post something, but it can also increase the engagement of your audience. You want to gain more customers, but with a good blog you can also build brand loyal customers, who trust you for pertinent information. Blogging can be easy and is often free, depending on the platform you use, so don’t delay – start your blog today!

If you would like customized help with setting up a blog and even finding content for your blog, please contact us today at 775.322.3663 or toll free at 1.800.233.0239!

I recently watched a video (Note: auto plays when clicked) from WebProNews.com with Sona Mehring, who created this incredible social support network for people who are diagnosed with potentially fatal diseases. Her platform is called CaringBridge.org and it has been around since 1997.

There is a lot of debate about Healthcare in the social sphere due to HIPPA laws and people worried about preserving their privacy. However, to us, Healthcare and social platforms are a win-win due to the basic need for humans to congregate when times are tough.

We need each other on a basic level to understand and validate the tough times and to celebrate our successes. It is increasingly important for people to feel connected – and if social platforms can help someone who feels horrible due to their health, feel support (without having to travel, get dressed up, or worry about how they look, or if they will feel ok once they get somewhere), then it is definitely worth having.

It should be easy enough to create an opt-in type situation where those who feel strongly that they don’t want to be involved in an online support structure, don’t have any of their information shared (as in their diagnosis in order to be in a specific targeted group for that condition). This would keep everyone protected while still allowing the support network to work for those who wish to participate.

What do you think about Privacy in Healthcare and the ability for Social Platforms to reach beyond for those who may be home bound?

We all feel the need to bend the rules sometimes. In social media, it’s no different, there are many ‘rules’ that can be bent or even broken – it’s new and most suspend judgement – except on this one area.

Social media has one LAW that should NEVER be broken.

You may think you know what it is – and maybe you are right. Social media is about CONVERSATIONS – if you are shutting down conversations, you are breaking the LAW!

The point is not to push your opinion on others, but to provide a place where everyone can express their opinions. It is our job to promote a discussion where all sides are safe to express themselves. Catherine Lockey from Cyclone Marketing brings up this same idea in regard to Linkedin. Her blog post, “Are you the King of Linkedin?” talks about 6 surefire ways to alienate your connections by trying to be in charge of the discussion; I have listed them below.

The Know It All

Arrogance

Yes Man / Woman

Group Control Freak (Bully)

Spammer

Innovative Entrepreneurial Expert

We believe these types of behaviors all lead to the same place – controlling and quashing the conversation – and they should be avoided on all social media platforms in order to be truly successful in online communities.

Remember, the online community has a long memory and although they can be very forgiving of honest mistakes, they are NOT going to forget a mistake of this caliber. You have chosen to be online and social in order to share your opinions and thoughts – allow others the freedom and respect to do the same – whether they agree with you, or not, doesn’t matter. Instead, try to facilitate the conversation in a safe place (like your Facebook fan page or in your Linkedin group), and the online community will remember and respect you because of your willingness to listen.

Have you had an experience (good or bad) where someone was trying to control the conversation or push their agenda? Share it with us on Facebook!

Bryan discusses ways to use social media for Data Collection and building your database with more information than was ever available to marketers prior to social media platforms – the ease of users or fans or followers to ‘sign-in’ to your site with their platform credentials allows for more information to be had by you on their behaviors, demographics, and interests than ever before.

Lead management is more efficient and better aligned between sales and marketing departments in this new world of social technology. Apps are available (often for free) to compile data and use it to make decisions about buyer interest. Marketing efforts toward specific demographics are also easily analyzed, which leads to faster decision making abilities within your company.

Engagement covers two of the sections Bryan writes about, “Cross-Channel Campaign Management” and Social Marketing. Engagement is definitely a new field for business-to-business marketing, many top B2B companies are still not on board with the idea of using social media for marketing and staunchly express that it only makes sense for B2C businesses.

Hopefully, these businesses will realize they’re mistaken before the early adopters in their industries run away with their share of the market. The truth of the matter is that all businesses can benefit from social media marketing because all businesses are run by PEOPLE and all products and services are bought by PEOPLE – whether for a company purpose or a personal one, people are always the deciding factor.

If you are a B2B company that wants to take the lead in your industry and begin utilizing the amazing social tools of our time for marketing purposes, please let us know!

We love talking about how social media can help you be more successful and how we can help you get there. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.